Saturday, March 18, 2017

What abortion rights activists really mean when they talk about a "review"

(First published in The Dominion Post, March 17.)

Is there any issue more polarising than abortion?

It’s a sensitive subject because we know that tens of
thousands of New Zealand women, in fact probably hundreds of thousands, have
had abortions.

They will have had them for a variety of reasons – some
compelling, others perhaps less so.

We know from Abortion Supervisory Committee reports that
some women have had multiple abortions. Of those who had abortions in 2015, 43
had had seven or more, 74 had had six and 193 had had five, which suggests they
regarded the procedure as no big deal and presumably no great cause for regret.

But a much greater number of women will have agonised over
the decision, and a significant number will have suffered psychological
consequences.

Decades of feminist insistence that abortion is simply a
matter of women’s rights and women’s health won’t necessarily have made them
feel any better about getting rid of the human life taking shape inside them.

Some will have seen the 2015 film Room, starring Brie Larson in an Oscar-winning performance as a
woman who has been held captive as a sex slave for seven years.

In that time she has given birth to a boy, fathered by her
captor. Mother and son live in total isolation from the outside world,
imprisoned in a soundproofed garden shed.

The film’s appeal stems largely from the warmth and empathy
between the woman and her smart, inquisitive son, whom she loves with a fierce
passion.

It’s a daring film because it challenges the notion that the
only option for a woman made pregnant through rape is to have the baby aborted.

Of course the rape victim in Room had no choice. But the film’s clear message is that even a
child fathered by a monster and conceived against the mother’s will - in other words, an unwanted child - can be
loved and cherished.

In this respect, the film is almost subversive, because it
offers a counter-narrative to the one that dominates the abortion debate.

This is an issue so polarised that even the labels applied
to the opposing camps are contentious. Abortion rights lobbyists prefer to be
called pro-choice rather than pro-abortion, which is understandable.

“Pro-abortion” implies that they think sucking a foetus out
of the womb and dumping it in a plastic-lined bin is a good thing, which surely
can’t be the case. “Pro-choice” frames the issue much more inoffensively as an
issue of women’s rights rather than babies’ deaths.

Conversely, “anti-abortion” suggests a hard, unsympathetic line
and may even conjure up images of the fanatics who firebomb abortion clinics.
“Pro-life” puts a friendlier, more positive spin on the anti-abortion stance.

We can expect to hear more from these groups after the Abortion
Supervisory Committee, in its latest report, recommended a review of the
40-year-old legislation that sets out the circumstances in which abortions may
legally be carried out. Like it or not, we’re back in the old minefield.

Abortion rights activists took the report as the cue to
mount a fresh campaign for liberalisation of the law, as the committee surely must
have known they would.

The activists were quick to pick up the committee’s
statement that some of the language in the Contraception, Sterilisation and
Abortion (CSA) Act is sexist and outdated, as if that somehow renders the entire
legislation invalid.

Outdated language can be easily fixed, but highlighting the
issue is a clever propaganda tactic because it portrays the Act as a quaint
hangover from an era when men supposedly told women what to do.

In truth, the renewed debate is about much more than
semantics. Complaints about sexist language are a smokescreen, because merely
making the Act gender-neutral wouldn’t achieve the activists’ objective.

When they talk about “reviewing” the legislation, what they
really mean is rewriting it to make abortion available on request – their goal
since the 1970s.

The committee has obligingly opened the door a crack and the
abortion rights lobby has jammed its foot into the gap, as the committee possibly
intended.

The abortion rights lobby wants abortion decriminalised –
that is to say, no longer treated as an offence under the Crimes Act, which
they regard as an anachronism.

To all intents and purposes the provision relating to
abortion in the Crimes Act is negated anyway by the CSA Act, which enables the Crimes
Act to be legally sidestepped.

Nonetheless, the fact that abortion remains in the Crimes Act serves a symbolic purpose. It's a reminder that abortion involves extinguishing a life, no matter how hard the pro-choice lobby tries to disguise the fact.

Behind abortion on demand and the push for euthenasia is a mechanistic view of human life. If we are simply a confluence of time plus chance plus the impersonal, then what does any of this matter? However, if all human life is a gift from a loving creator who has formed us in his very image, who imbues our lives with meaning and purpose, then it matters very much indeed.

In an age when even the churches, with perhaps the exception of the Catholics, find it difficult to frame the conversation in this way it is almost too much to expect any politician to articulate this perspective. Even the openly Catholic Bill English appears to wish this would all go away rather than see this as an opportunity to promote what I assume to be his theological position.

We are living in a morally regressive pagan culture when 'choice' is the ultimate good, trumping even life itself.

Behind abortion on demand and the push for euthenasia is a mechanistic view of human life. If we are simply a confluence of time plus chance plus the impersonal, then what does any of this matter? However, if all human life is a gift from a loving creator who has formed us in his very image, who imbues our lives with meaning and purpose, then it matters very much indeed.

In an age when even the churches, with perhaps the exception of the Catholics, find it difficult to frame the conversation in this way it is almost too much to expect any politician to articulate this perspective. Even the openly Catholic Bill English appears to wish this would all go away rather than see this as an opportunity to promote what I assume to be his theological position.

We are living in a morally regressive pagan culture when 'choice' is the ultimate good, trumping even life itself.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.